Blame it on the white man

I was greatly dismayed to read in the Empire on June 4 that I had blown up a school, denied jobs to people because of the color of their skin, and committed murder. I don't remember doing any of these things. The truth is: I didn't.

I just happened to be an 18-year-old white male, whom the writer of that article was blaming for events that happened long before I was even born.

To bring it into the present, he says that when people of different races falsely accuse each other of crimes, it is whites committing "racial hoaxes" 67 percent of the time. He fails to point out that 75 percent of our population is white. So per capita, whites actually do less than our share of false cross-racial accusations, instead of the "overwhelming majority," which the author claims.

He also fails to reveal how often whites accuse each other falsely.

We can't even tell how common cross-race accusations are. The statistics he uses are not only incomplete but misleading in the picture of race relations that they paint.

I would generally expect far more of a man who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, but unfortunately he is not alone in his biased views. The same attitude is reflected by the fact that we are now considering for the U.S. Supreme Court Judge Sotomayor, who believes that Latino women are inherently "better" justices, who are more "wise" than white men.

I do not deny that people of my race did some pretty terrible things in the past, but it is not right to place blame on those of us who never did anything wrong. Racial equality requires forgiveness.